Harvesting potatoes

It is the busiest time in a year for an amateur farmer. I have been kept busy doing with weeds, planting summer vegetables like pumpkins, long beans, ocras, eggplants, water melons or more sweet potatoe seedlings. Onions have been harvested. Not so good this year possibly due to poor growth of the seedlings.

Potatoes have been on a farm bed prepared with natural farming method. High bed with a lot of grass mulch as a source of compost and a lot of rice bran as not only a fertilizer but also more of activator for the soil flora.

The harvest was like this. A big success. No chemical fertilizer nor pesticides etc. A lot o big potatoes were grown without any damage from insects. I should crop much more from the rest of the farm.

It is interesting that such a vegetable could grow without any chemicals. Natural farming is a movement to ecological agriculture. Not much such as fertilizers or pesticides won't be used. But such as grass compost or rice bran is applied to the farm. Not much plowing. There is a dynamic ecological environment in the soil. Mycorrhizal fungi or the other flora in the soil are proliferated and work to give nutrients like nitrogen chemical to the plants. As little handling of the ground as possible is given to the soil. 

They say it would take several years to have the soil matured, that is, becoming rich enough for natural farming. I might be too late to start with it. But still would like to go on in that method good for the environment and economical without much expenditure for agricultural materials.

I am doing it with only hands and scoop/shovel. Some people are doing farming in this style for their profession and are successful to live on with it.